The Potter Diaries
by Acolyte of the Hammer
Summary: Harry and his allies fight against the oppressive government that Lord Voldemort has forced upon the Wizarding world.
1. Chapter 1

Chapter 1

September 16:

Today it finally began! After all these years of talking-and nothing but talking-we have finally taken our first action. We are at war with Lord Voldemort, and it is no longer a war of words. I cannot sleep, so I will try writing down some of the thoughts which are flying through my head. It is not safe to talk here. The walls are quite thin, and the neighbors might wonder at a late-night conference. Besides, Ron and Snape are already asleep. Only Hermione and I are still awake, and she's just staring at the ceiling.

I am really uptight. l am so jittery I can barely sit still. And I'm exhausted. I've been up since 5:30 this morning, when Ron phoned to warn that the arrests had begun, and it's after midnight now. I've been keyed up and on the move all day.

But at the same time I'm exhilarated. We have finally acted! How long we will be able to continue defying Lord Voldemort, no one knows. Maybe it will all end tomorrow, but we must not think about that. Now that we have begun, we must continue with the plan we have been developing so carefully ever since the Wand Raids two years ago.

What a blow that was to us! And how it shamed us! All that brave talk by patriots, "The ministry will never take my wand away," and then nothing but meek submission when it happened.

On the other hand, maybe we should be heartened by the fact that there were still so many of us who had wands then, nearly 18 months after the Malfoy Act had outlawed all private ownership of wands longer than three centimeters in the Wizard World. It was only because so many of us defied the law and hid our weapons instead of turning them in that the government wasn't able to act more harshly against us after the Wand Raids.

I'll never forget that terrible day: November 9, three years ago. They burst through the painting at five in the morning. I was completely unsuspecting as I got up to see who it was.

I watched in horror as four Death Eaters came pushing into the dormitory before I could stop them. One was carrying a baseball bat, and two had long sacrificial daggers thrust into their belts. The one with the bat shoved me back into a corner and stood guard over me with his bat raised in a threatening position while the other three began ransacking the dormitory.

My first thought was that they were robbers. Robberies of this sort had become all too common since the Malfoy Act, with groups of Dementors forcing their way into Wizard homes to rob and rape, knowing that even if their victims had wands they probably would not dare use them.

Then the one who was guarding me flashed some kind of badge and informed me that he and his accomplices were "special deputies" for the Ministry of Magic Wizard Relations Council. They were searching for illegal wands, he said.

I couldn't believe it. It just couldn't be happening. Then I saw that they were wearing strips of green unicorn hair talismans tied around their left arms. As they dumped the contents of drawers on the floor and pulled luggage from the trunks, they were ignoring things that robbers wouldn't have passed up: my brand-new Nimbus 8000, my invisibility cloak, Neville's new platinum Remembrall. They were looking for wands!

Right after the Malfoy Act was passed, all of us in the Order had cached our wands where they weren't likelyto be found. Those in my unit had carefully wrapped our wands, sealed them with a Conundrius charm, and spent all of one tediousweekend burying the drum in the forbidden forest.

But I had kept one wand out of the cache. I had hidden my backup wand inside my bedpost. By pulling out two loosened nails and removing one board from the bed, I could get to my wand in about two minutes flat if I ever needed it. I had timed myself.

But a Dementor would never uncover it. And these inexperienced Death Eaters couldn't find it in a million years. After the three who were conducting the search had looked in all the obvious places, they began slitting the mattresses. We protested vigorously at this and I briefly considered trying to put up a fight.

About that time there was a commotion out in the common room. Another group of searchers had found a wand hidden under one of the girls' beds . She had been handcuffed and was being forcibly escorted toward the stairs. She was clad only in her underwear, and was complaining loudly.

Another man walked into my apartment. He was a Death Auror. He also wore a talisman, and he carried dusty bag and magicboard.

The Death Eaters greeted him deferentially and reported the negative result of their search: "No wands here, Mr. Tepper."

Tepper ran his finger down the list of names on his magicboard until he came to mine. He frowned. "This is a bad one," he said. "This is Harry freaking Potter."

Tepper opened the bag and took out a small, black object about the size of a house elf which was attached by a long cord to a graven rod in the bag. He began moving the black object in long sweeps back and forth over the walls, while the bag emitted a dull, rumbling noise. The rumble rose in pitch as the gadget approached one of the torches on the wall, but Tepper convinced himself that the change was caused by the magical interference of the torch. He continued his methodical sweep.

As he swept over the left side of the painting the rumble jumped to a piercing shriek. Tepper grunted excitedly, and one of the Death Eaters went out and came back a few seconds later with a sledge hammer and a pry bar. It took the Death Eater substantially less than two minutes after that to find my wand.

I was bound with a binding charm without further ado and led outside. Ron and Hermione began to protest, but I used our secret blinking signal to tell them to keep quiet. I was led outside to wait next to the girl.

Mr Tepper and some of his "deputies" had more searches to carry out, but three large Dementors were left to guard us in front of the now badly ripped painting of the Fat Lady. Both of us were forced to sit on the cold stone floor for more than an hour until an enslaved dragon finally came for us, which turned out to be Norbert.

As the other Gryffindors left for class, they eyed us curiously. We were shivering, and the girl was weeping uncontrollably.

Cho Chang stopped to ask what it was all about. One of our guards brusquely explained that we were both under arrest for possessing illegal wands. Cho stared at us and shook her head disapprovingly.

Then the Dementor pointed to me and said: "And that one's a racist." I looked up with a start. What was he talking about? Cho spat and moved on.

Ernie MacMillan, who used to belong to the Order and was one of the most outspoken of the "they'll-never-get-my-wand" people before the Malfoy Act, walked by quickly with his eyes averted. His bed had been searched too, but MacMillan was clean. He had been practically the first man in town to turn his wand over to the Ministry after the passage of the Malfoy Act made him liable to ten years imprisonment at Azkaban if he kept them.

That was the penalty the two of us on the floor were facing. It didn't work out that way, though. The reason it didn't is that the raids which were carried out all over the country that day netted a lot more fish than Lord Voldemort had counted on: more than 80,000 wizards were arrested.

At first the Daily Prophet tried hard to work up enough public sentiment against us so that the arrests would stick. The fact that there weren't enough cells in Azkaban to hold us all could be remedied by herding us into barbed-wire enclosures outdoors until new prison facilities could be readied, the newspapers suggested. In freezing weather!

I still remember the Prophet headline the next day: "Fascist-Racist Conspiracy Smashed, Illegal Wands Seized." But not even the brainwashed Wizarding public could fully accept the idea that nearly a hundred thousand of their fellow wizards had been engaged in a secret, armed conspiracy. However, I was still confused about these allegations of racism.

As more and more details of the raids leaked out, public restlessness grew. One of the details which bothered people was that the raiders had, for the most part, exempted Death Eater homes from the searches. The explanation given at first for this was that since "racists" were the ones primarily suspected of harboring wands, there was relatively little need to search Death Eater homes.

The peculiar logic of this explanation broke down when it turned out that a number of persons who could hardly be considered either "racists" or "fascists" had been caught up in the raids. Among them were two prominent Quidditch players who had earlier been in the forefront of the antiwand crusade, four Death Eater Wizengamut members (they lived in Wizard neighborhoods), and an embarrassingly large number of Ministry officials.

The list of persons to be raided, it turned out, had been compiled primarily from wands sales records which all wand dealers had been required to keep. If a person had turned a wand in to the police after the Malfoy Act was passed, his name was marked off the list. If he hadn't it stayed on, and he was raided on November 9.

In addition, certain categories of Wizards were raided whether they had ever purchased a firearm from a dealer or not. All the members of the Order were raided.

The Ministry's list of suspects was so large that a number of "responsible" civilian groups were deputized to assist in the raids. I guess Voldemort thought that most of the people on the list had either sold their wands privately before the Malfoy Act, or had disposed of them in some other way. Probably they were expecting only about a quarter as many people to be arrested as actually were.

Anyway, the whole thing soon became so embarrassing and so unwieldy that most of the arrestees were turned loose again within a week. The group I was with-some 600 of us-was held for three days in a muggle gymnasium in Yorkshire before being released. During those three days we were fed only four times, and we got virtually no sleep.

But the Ministry did get mug shots, aura-prints, and personal data from everyone. When we were released we were told that we were still technically under arrest and could expect to be picked up again for prosecution at any time.

The Prophet kept yelling for prosecutions for awhile, but the issue was gradually allowed to die. Actually, the Death Eaters had bungled the affair rather badly.

For a few days we were all more frightened and glad to be free than anything else. A lot of people in the Order dropped out right then and there. They didn't want to take any more chances.

Others stayed in but used the Wand Raids as an excuse for inactivity. Now that the patriotic element in the population had been disarmed, they argued, we were all at the mercy of Lord Voldemort and had to be much more careful. They wanted us to cease all public recruiting activities and "go underground."

As it turned out, what they really had in mind was for the Order to restrict itself henceforth to "safe" activities, such activities to consist principally in complaining-better yet, whispering-to one another about how bad things were.

The more militant members, on the other hand, were for digging up our wand caches and unleashing a program of magical terror against Lord Voldemort immediately, carrying out executions of Ministry officials, Death Eaters, Dementors, and other Wizard-traitors. The time was ripe for such action, they felt, because in the wake of the Wand Raids we could win public sympathy for such a campaign against tyranny.

It is hard to say now whether the militants were right. Personally, I think they were wrong-although I counted myself as one of them at the time. We could certainly have killed a number of the creatures responsible for our people's ills, but I believe we would have lost in the long run.

For one thing, the Order just wasn't well disciplined enough for waging terror against Lord Voldemort. There were too many cowards and blabbermouths among us. Informers, fools, weaklings, and irresponsible jerks would have been our undoing.

For a second thing, I am sure now that we were overoptimistic in our judgment of the mood of the public. What we mistook as general resentment against Lord Voldemort's abrogation of civil rights during the Wand Raids was more a passing wave of uneasiness resulting from all the commotion involved in the mass arrests. Remarkably, nobody seemed to remember how he had obtained power in the first place.

As soon as the public had been reassured by the Daily Prophet that they were in no danger, that the government was cracking down only on the "racists, fascists, and other anti-social elements" who had kept illegal wands, most relaxed again and went back to their day jobs and Quidditch games.

As we began to realize this, we were more discouraged than ever. We had based all our plans-in fact, the whole rationale of the Order-on the assumption that Wizards were inherently opposed to tyranny, and that when Lord Voldemort became oppressive enough they could be led to overthrow him. We had badly underestimated the degree to which materialism had corrupted our fellow citizens, as well as the extent to which their feelings could be manipulated by the Ministry.

As long as the government is able to keep the economy somehow gasping and wheezing along, the people can be conditioned to accept any outrage. Despite the continuing inflation and the gradually declining standard of living, most Wizards are still able to keep their bellies full today, and we must simply face the fact that that's the only thing which counts with most of them.

Discouraged and uncertain as we were, though, we began laying new plans for the future. First, we decided to maintain our program of public recruiting. In fact, we intensified it and deliberately made our propaganda as provocative as possible. The purpose was not only to attract new members with a militant disposition, but at the same time to purge the Order of the fainthearts and hobbyists-the "talkers."

We also tightened up on discipline. Anyone who missed a scheduled meeting twice in a row was expelled. Anyone who failed to carry out a work assignment was tortured. Anyone who violated our rule against loose talk about Order matters was exterminated. Hermione, especially, was always quick to remind us that "loose lips sink ships."

We had made up our minds to have an Order that would be ready the next time Lord Voldemort provided an opportunity to strike. The shame of our failure to act, indeed, our inability to act, after Wand Raids tormented us and drove us without mercy. It was probably the single most important factor in steeling our wills to whip the Order into fighting trim, despite all obstacles.

Another thing that helped-at least, with me-was the constant threat of rearrest and prosecution. Even if I had wanted to give it all up and join the Quidditch-and-office crowd, I couldn't. I could make no plans for a "normal," civilian future, never knowing when I might be prosecuted under the Malfoy Act.

So I, and I know this also applies to Ron and Snape and Hermione, threw myself without reservation into work for the Order and made only plans for the future of the Order. My private life had ceased to matter.

Whether the Order actually is ready, I guess we'll find out soon enough. So far, so good, though. Our plan for avoiding another mass roundup seems to have worked.

Early last year we began putting a number of new members, unknown to the Death Aurors, into the Ministry and various quasi-official organizations, such as the Ministry of Magic Wizard Relations Council. They served as our early-warning network and otherwise kept us generally informed of Lord Voldemort's plans against us.

We were surprised at the ease with which we were able to set up and operate this network.

Omigod! It's 4:00 AM. Got to get some sleep!


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

September 18:

These last two days have really been a comedy of errors, and today the comedy nearly became a tragedy. When the others were finally able to wake me up yesterday, we put our heads together to figure what to do. The first thing, we all agreed, was to arm ourselves and then to find a better hideout.

Our unit - that is, the four of us - rented this old dusty cottage under a false name nearly six months ago, just to have it available when we needed it. (We just beat the new law which requires a landlord to furnish the Ministry with the Full Adult Wizard Number of every new tenant, just like when a person opens an account at Gringots.) Because we've stayed away from the apartment until now, I'm sure the Ministry hasn't connected any of us with this address.

But it's too small for all of us to live here for any length of time, and it doesn't offer enough privacy from the neighbors. We were too anxious to save gold when we picked this place.

Gold is our main problem now. We thought to stock this place with food, medicine, tools, spare clothing, maps - even a broomstick - but we forgot about money. Two days ago, when the word came that they were starting the arrests again, we had no chance to withdraw money from Gringots; it was too early in the morning. Now our accounts are surely frozen.

So we have only the cash that was in our pockets at the time: a little over 14 galleons altogether.

And no transportation except for a dusty broom which had all but lost its magic. According to plan, we had all abandoned our personal brooms, since the Ministry would be looking for them.

Yesterday Ron, who is our contact with Unit 9, took the dusty broom and flew over to talk to them about the situation. They're a little better off than we are, but not much. The six of them have about 80 galleons, but they're crowded into a hole in the wall which is even less satisfactory than ours, according to Ron.

They do have four flying carpets, imported straight from Saudi Arabia and a fair number of house elves. Seamus Finnegan, who is with them, made some very convincing counterfeit ID plaques for everyone with a broom in his unit. We should have done the same, but it's too late now.

They offered Ron one 1978 Nimbus Gremlin and 10 galleons, which he gratefully accepted. They didn't want to let go of any of their house elves, though.

That still left us with no money to rent another place, and no house elf to send back to our wand cache. We didn't even have enough money to buy a week's groceries when our food stock ran out, and that would be in about another four days.

The network will be established in ten days, but until then we are on our own. Furthermore, when our unit joins the network it is expected to have already solved its supply problems and be ready to go into action in concert with the other units.

If we had more money we could solve all our problems, including the house elf problem. House elves are always available on the black market, of course - at nearly twice what it costs at the harbor.

We stewed over our situation until this afternoon. Then, desperate not to waste any more time, we finally decided to go out and take some money. Hermione and I were stuck with the chore, since we couldn't afford for Ron to get arrested again. He's the only one who knows the network code.

We had Snape do a pretty good polyjuice job on us first. For once the bastard proved useful.

My inclination was just to walk into the first liquor store we came to, knock the manager on the head with a brick, and scoop up the money from the cash register.

Hermione wouldn't go along with that, though. She said we couldn't use means which contradicted our ends. If we begin preying on the public to support ourselves, we will be viewed as a gang of common criminals, regardless of how lofty our aims are. Worse, we will eventually begin to think of ourselves the same way.

Hermione looks at everything in terms of our ideology. If something doesn't fit, she'll have nothing to do with it.

In a way this may seem impractical, but I think maybe she's right. Only by making our beliefs into a living faith which guides us from day to day can we maintain the moral strength to overcome the obstacles and hardships which lie ahead.

Anyway, she convinced me that if we are going to rob liquor stores we have to do it in a socially conscious way. If we are going to cave in people's heads with bricks, they must be people who deserve it.

By comparing the liquor store listings in the Wizard Directory with a list of supporting members of the Ministry of Magic Wizard Relations Council which had been filched for us by the girl we sent over there to do volunteer work for them, we finally settled on Dredgit Liquors and Wines, Dredgit the Drunken, proprietor.

There were no bricks handy, so we equipped ourselves with blackjacks consisting of good - sized bars of Salamanker's Sudswirls Soap inside long, strong ski socks. Hermione also tucked a sheath knife into her belt.

We parked about a block and a half from Dredgit's Liquors, around the corner. When we went in there were no customers in the store. A Dementor (good for business, if you're selling booze) was at the cash register, tending the store.

Hermione asked him for a bottle of vodka on a high shelf behind the counter. When he turned around I let him have it at the base of the skull with my "Sudswirls special." He dropped silently to the floor and remained motionless.

"Hey, Hermione," I asked, "did you know that you can fell Dementors with Salamanker's soap?"

Hermione sighed exasperatedly. "Obviously it's because of the patronus essence that they mix into it."

"Does that do anything? I mean, like for soap?" I asked.

"Of course not. It's a marketing gimmick."

"By the Goblins of course." I added.

Hermione nodded solemnly and calmly emptied the cash register and a cigar box under the counter which held the larger denominations. We walked out and headed for the broom. We had gotten a little over 165 galleons. It had been surprisingly easy.

Three stores down Hermione suddenly stopped and pointed out the sign on the door: "Dredgit's Deli." Without a moment's hesitation she pushed open the door and walked in. Spurred on by a sudden, reckless impulse I followed her instead of trying to stop her.

Dredgit the Drunken himself was behind the counter, at the back. Hermione lured him out by asking the price of an item near the front of the store which Dredgit couldn't see clearly from behind the counter.

As he passed me, I let him have it in the back of the head as hard as I could. I felt the bar of Salamanker's shatter from the force of the blow.

Dredgit went down yelling at the top of his lungs. Then he started crawling rapidly toward the back of the store, screaming in Gobbledegook, loud enough to wake the dead. I was completely unnerved by the racket and stood frozen.

Not Hermione though. She leaped onto the goblin's back, seized him by the hair, and cut his throat from one pointy ear to the other in one, swift motion.

The silence lasted about one second. Then a fat, grotesque looking goblin woman of about 160 - probably Dredgit's wife - came charging out of the back room waving a meat cleaver and emitting an ear-piercing shriek.

Hermione let fly at her with a large box of chocolate frogs and scored a direct hit. She went down in a spray of chocolate and blood.

Hermione then cleaned out the cash register, looked for another cigar box under the counter, found it, and scooped the coins out.

I snapped out of my trance and followed Hermione out the front door as the fat woman started shrieking again. Hermione had to hold me by the arm to keep me from running down the sidewalk.

It didn't take us but about 15 seconds to walk back to the broom, but it seemed more like 15 minutes. I was terrified. It was more than an hour before I had stopped shaking and gotten enough of a grip on myself to talk without stuttering. Some terrorist!

Altogether we got 295 galleons, 13 sickles and 26 knuts - enough to buy groceries for the four of us for more than two months. But one thing was decided then and there: Hermione will have to be the one to rob any more liquor stores. I don't have the nerves for it - although I had thought I was doing all right until Dredgit started yelling.

September 19: Looking back over what I've written, it's hard to believe these things have really happened. Until the Wand Raids two years ago, my life was about as normal as anyone's can be in these times.

Even after I was arrested and lost my scholarship at Hogwarts, I was still able to live pretty much like everyone else by doing consulting for Fred and George. The only thing out of the ordinary about my lifestyle was my work for the Order.

Now everything is chaotic and uncertain. When I think about the future I become depressed. It's impossible to know what will happen, but it's certain that I'll never be able to go back to the quiet, orderly kind of life I had before.

Looks like what I'm writing is the beginning of a diary. Perhaps it will help me to write down what's happened and what my thoughts are each day. Maybe it will add some focus to things, some order, and make it easier for me to keep a grip on myself and become reconciled to this new way of life.

It's funny how all the excitement I felt the first night here is gone. All I feel now is apprehension. Maybe the change of scenery tomorrow will improve my outlook. Hermione and I will be flying to get our wands, while Ron and Snape try to find us a more suitable place to live.

As rationing has increased during the last few years, so has petty corruption of every sort. I guess a lot of the large-scale graft in the Ministry which the Fudge incident revealed a few years back has finally filtered down to the man in the street. When people began realizing that the big-shot politicians were crooked, they were more inclined to try to cheat Lord Voldemort a little themselves. All the new rationing red tape has just exacerbated the tendency-as has the growing percentage of Dementors in every level of the bureaucracy.

The Order has been one of the main critics of this corruption, but I can now see that it gives us an important advantage. If everybody obeyed the law and did everything by the book, it would be nearly impossible for an underground group to exist.

Not only would we not be able to buy house elves, but a thousand other bureaucratic obstacles with which Lord Voldemort increasingly hems the lives of our fellow citizens would be insurmountable for us. As it is, a bribe to a local official here or a few knuts under the counter to a clerk or secretary there will allow us to get around many of the Ministry regulations which would otherwise trip us up.

Looking at it philosophically, one can't avoid the conclusion that it is corruption, not tyranny, which leads to the overthrow of governments. A strong and vigorous government, no matter how oppressive, usually need not fear revolution. But a corrupt, inefficient, decadent government - even a benevolent one - is always ripe for revolution. The system we are fighting is both corrupt and oppressive, and we should be thankful for the corruption.

The silence about us in the newspapers is worrisome. The Dredgit thing the other day wasn't connected to us, of course, and it was given only a paragraph in today's Prophet. Robberies of that sort - even where there is killing involved - are so common these days that they merit no more attention than a traffic accident.

But the fact that the Ministry launched a massive roundup of known Order members last Wednesday and that nearly all of us, more than 2,000 persons, have managed to slip through their fingers and drop out of sight - why isn't that in the papers? The news media are collaborating closely with the Ministy, of course, but what is their strategy against us?

There was one small article on a back page of yesterday's paper mentioning the arrest of nine "racists" in London and four in Edinburgh on Wednesday. The article said that all 13 who were arrested were members of the same organization - evidently ours - but no further details were given. Curious!

Are they keeping quiet about the failure of the roundup so as not to embarrass the Ministry? That's not like them.

Probably, they're a little paranoid about the ease with which we evaded the roundup. They may have fears that some substantial portion of the public is in sympathy with us and is aiding us, and they don't want to say anything that will give encouragement to our sympathizers.

We must be careful that this false appearance of "business as usual" doesn't mislead us into relaxing our vigilance. We can be sure that the Ministry is in a crash program to find us. It will be a relief when the network is established and we can once again receive regular reports from our informants as to just what the rascals are up to.

Meanwhile, our security rests primarily in our changed appearances and identities. We've all changed our hair styles and either dyed or bleached our hair. I've begun wearing new glasses with heavy frames instead of my old round ones, and Snape has switched from his contact lenses to glasses. Hermione has undergone the most radical transformation, by drinking polyjuice potion. And we all have pretty convincing fake broom licenses, although they won't stand up if they are ever checked against Ministry records.

Whenever any of us has to do something like the robberies last week, Snape can do a quick-change job and temporarily give him a third identity.

Tomorrow will be a long, hard day.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter III

September 21. Every muscle in my body aches. Yesterday we spent 10 hours hiking, digging, and carrying loads of wands, spell components, and potion ingredients through the woods. This evening we moved all our supplies from the old cottage to our new hideout.

It was a little before noon yesterday when we reached the turnoff near Edinburgh and left the highway which we had been using as our guide. Since the muggle highway system was easily plottable, we knew it would be unlikely that the Death Eaters would look for us there. We flew as close to our cache as we could, but the only clearing we could land in was nearly a kilometer away.

The consequence was that we had nearly a two-kilometer hike each way instead of less than half a kilometer. And it took three round trips to get everything to the Hover Trunk we had brought with us. We brought shovels, a rope, and a couple of large canvas sacks, but, as it turned out, these tools were woefully inadequate for the task.

Hiking from the brooms to the cache with our shovels on our shoulders was actually refreshing, after the long flight up from London. The day was pleasantly cool, the autumn woods were beautiful, and the old dirt road, though heavily overgrown, provided easy walking most of the way.

Even digging down to the top of the large cauldron in which we had sealed our collection wasn't too bad. The ground was fairly soft, and it took us less than an hour to excavate a two-meter-deep pit and tie our rope to the handles which had been sealed to the lid of the cauldron.

Then our trouble began. Hermione and I tugged on the rope as hard as we could, but the cauldron wouldn't budge an inch. It was as if it had been set in stone.

Although the full cauldron weighed nearly 200 kilograms, two of us had been able to lower it into the pit without undue difficulty three years ago. At that time, of course, there had been several centimeters of clearance all around it. Now the earth had settled and was packed tightly against the metal.

We gave up trying to get the cauldron out of the hole and decided to open it where it was. To do that we had to dig for nearly another hour, enlarging the hole and clearing a few centimeters all around the top of the cauldron so we could get our hands on the chain which secured the lid. Even so, I had to go into the hole headfirst, with Hermione holding my legs.

Although the outside of the cauldron had been painted with dragon blood to magic decay, the locking lever itself was thoroughly rusted, and I broke the only screwdriver we had trying to pry it loose. Finally, after much pounding, I was able to pry the lever out from the cauldron with the end of a shovel. With the chain loosened, however, the lid remained as tightly in place as ever, apparently stuck to the drum by the dragon blood coating we had applied.

Working upside down in the narrow hole was difficult and exhausting. We had no tool satisfactory for wedging under the lip of the lid and prying it up. Finally, almost in desperation, I once again tied the rope to one of the handles on the lid. Hermione and I gave a hard tug, and the lid popped off!

Then it was just a matter of my going headfirst into the hole again, supporting myself with one arm on the edge of the cauldron, and passing the carefully wrapped bundles of supplies up past my body so that Hermione could reach them. Some of the larger bundles- and that included six sealed pouches of spell ingredients- were both too heavy and too bulky for this method and had to be hauled up by rope.

Needless to say, by the time we had the cauldron empty I was completely pooped. My arms ached, my legs were unsteady, and my clothing was drenched with perspiration. But we still had to carry more than 150 kilograms of supplies half a kilometer through dense woods, uphill to the clearing, and then more than a mile back to the brooms.

We had to stop every hundred meters or so and put our loads down for a minute, and the last two trips were made in total darkness. It finally dawned on Hermione to take out one of the wands and use magic to carry the last of our supplies. After such an exhausting time getting the supplies out of the cauldron, we had apparently lost our good sense. If we don't do a better job of planning our operations in the future, we have some rough times ahead!

On the way back to London we stopped at a small roadside cafe near Manchester for sandwiches and coffee. There were about a dozen wizards in the place, and an evening broadcast of the Wizard News (controlled by Goblins of course) was showing on a crystal ball behind the counter when we walked in. It was a news broadcast I'll never forget.

The big story of the day was what the Order had been up to in Liverpool. Lord Voldemort, it seems, had killed one of our people, and in turn we had killed three Death Eaters and then engaged in a spectacular - and successful - wandfight with the authorities. Nearly the whole newscast was occupied in recounting these events.

We already knew from the papers that nine of our members had been arrested in Liverpool last week, and apparently they had had a rough time in the Lancashire Wizarding Jail (Azkaban's capacity being stretched to the limit), where one of them had died. It was impossible to be sure exactly what had happened from what the news announcer said, but if Lord Voldemort had behaved true to form the authorities had stuck our people individually into cells full of Dementors and then shut their eyes and ears to what ensued.

That has long been Lord Voldemort's extra-legal way of punishing our people when they can't pin anything on them that will "stick" in the courts. It's a more ghastly and dreadful punishment than anything which ever took place in a medieval torture chamber or in the cellars of the KGB. And they can get away with it because the news media usually won't even admit that it happens. After all, if you're trying to convince the public that the Dementors are really benign, how can you admit that it's worse to be locked in a cell full of Dementors than in a cell full of Wizards?

Anyway, the day after our man-the newscaster said his name was Cladipus Shortfoot, someone I've not heard of before-was killed, the Liverpool Order fulfilled a promise they'd made more than a year ago, in the event one of our people was ever seriously hurt in a Liverpool jail. They ambushed the Lancashire County sheriff outside his home and blew him to pieces with an arcane missile. They left a note pinned to his door which read: "That was for Shortfoot."

That was last Saturday night. On Sunday Lord Voldemort was up in arms. The sheriff of Lancashire County had been a political bigwig, a front-rank in the Ministry, and they were really raising hell.

Although they broadcast the news only to the Liverpool area on Sunday, they trotted out several pillars of the community there to denounce the assassination and the Order in special news appearances. One of the spokesmen was a "responsible conservative," and another was the head of the Liverpool Goblin community. All of them described the Order as a "gang of racist bigots" and called on "all right-thinking Liverpoolians" to cooperate with the political police in apprehending the "racists" who had killed the sheriff.

Well, early this morning the responsible conservative lost both his legs and suffered severe internal injuries when a Compressiatus bomb (courtesy of Fred and George's secret lab) which was attached to his broom went off. The Goblin spokesman was even less fortunate. Someone walked up to him while he was waiting for an elevator in the lobby of his office building, pulled a hatchet from under his coat, cleaved the good Goblin's head from crown to shoulder blades, then disappeared in the rush-hour crowd. The Order immediately claimed responsibility for both acts.

After that, it really hit the fan. The Alderman of Lancashire ordered Ministry troops into Liverpool to help local police hunt for Order members. Thousands of persons were being stopped on Liverpool streets today and asked to prove their identity. Lord Voldemort's paranoia is really showing.

This afternoon three men were cornered in a small apartment building in Carlisle. The whole block was surrounded by Ministry forces, while the trapped men dueled with the police. News crews were all over the place, anxious not to miss the kill.

One of the men in the apartment apparently used the Patronus curse, because two Dementors more than a block away were picked off before it was realized that Dementors were being singled out as targets and uniformed Wizard police were not being attacked. This Wizard immunity apparently was not extended to the plainrobed political police, however, because a Ministry agent was killed by a burst of killing curses from the apartment when he momentarily exposed himself to hurl a Emotio Potion through a window.

We watched breathlessly as this action was shown on the crystal ball, but the real climax came for us when the apartment was stormed and found empty. A quick room-by-room search of the building also failed to turn up the Order members.

Disappointment at this outcome was evident in the newsman's voice, but a man Wizard at the other end of the counter from us whistled and clapped when it was announced that the "racists" had apparently slipped away. The waitress smiled at this, and it seemed clear to us that, while there certainly was no unanimous approval for the Order's actions in Liverpool, neither was there unanimous disapproval.

Almost as if Lord Voldemort anticipated this reaction to the afternoon's events, the news scene switched to London, where the Assistant Minister of the Wizard World had called a special news conference. The Assistant Minister announced to the nation that the Ministry of Magic was throwing all its forces into the effort to root out the Order. He described us as "depraved, racist criminals" who were motivated solely by hatred and who wanted to "undo all the progress toward true equality" which had been made by Lord Voldemort in recent years.

All citizens were warned to be alert and to assist the government in breaking up the "racist conspiracy." Anyone observing any suspicious action, especially on the part of a stranger, was to report it immediately to the nearest Ministry office.

And then he said something very indiscreet, which really betrayed how worried Lord Voldemort is. He stated that any citizen found to be concealing information about us or offering us any comfort or assistance "would be dealt with severely." Those were his very words-the sort of thing one might expect to hear in the Soviet Union, but which would ring harshly on most Wizards ears, despite the best propaganda efforts of the Goblin media to justify it.

All the risks taken by our people in Liverpool were more than rewarded by provoking the Assistant Minister into such a psychological blunder. This incident also proves the value of keeping Lord Voldemort off balance with surprise attacks. If the Death Eaters had kept their cool and thought more carefully about a response to our Liverpool actions, it not only would have avoided a blunder which will bring us hundreds of new recruits, but it would probably have figured a way to win much wider public support for its fight against us.

The news program concluded with an announcement that an hour-long "special" on the "racist conspiracy" would be broadcast Tuesday night (i.e., tonight). We've just finished watching that "special," and it was a real hatchet job, full of errors and outright invention and not very convincing, we all felt. But one thing is certain: the media blackout is over. Liverpool has given the Order instant celebrity status, and we must certainly be the number-one topic of conversation everywhere in the nation.

As last night's news ended, Hermione and I choked down the last of our meal and stumbled outside. I was filled with emotions: excitement, elation over the success of our people in Liverpool, nervousness about being one of the targets of a nationwide manhunt, and chagrin that none of our units in the London area had shown the initiative of our Liverpool units.

I was itching to do something, and the first thing that occurred to me was to try to make some sort of contact with the fellow in the cafe who had seemed sympathetic to us. I wanted to take some leaflets from our trunk and put one in the bristles of every broom outside the cafe.

Hermione, who always keeps a cool head, emphatically vetoed the idea. As we straddled the brooms she explained that it was sheer folly to risk calling any attention whatever to ourselves until we had completed our present mission of safely delivering our load of supplies to our unit. Furthermore, she reminded me, it would be a breach of Order discipline for a member of an underground unit to engage in any direct recruiting activity, however minimal. That function has been relegated to the "legal" units.

The underground units consist of members who are known to the authorities and have been marked for arrest. Their function is to destroy Lord Voldemort through direct action. The "legal" units consist of members not presently known to Lord Voldemort. (Indeed, it would be impossible to prove that most of them are members. In this we have taken a page from the Death Eaters' book.) Their role is to provide us with intelligence, funding, legal defense, and other support.

Whenever an "illegal" spots a potential recruit, he is supposed to turn the information over to a "legal," who will approach the prospect and sound him out. The "legals" are also supposed to handle all the low-risk propaganda activity, such as leafleting. Strictly speaking, we should not even have had any Order leaflets with us.

We waited until the man who had applauded the escape of our members in Liverpool came out and got on a Cleansweep. We flew by him and noted his broom number as we pulled out of the lot. When the network is established, the information will go to the proper person for a follow-up.

When we arrived back at the apartment, Ron and Snape were as excited as Hermione and I. They had also seen the newscast. Despite the exertions of the day, I could no more sleep than they, and we all piled back onto our brooms, Ron and Snape sharing the Nimbus with part of our greasy cargo, and went to an empty (and unplottable) field. We could stay there and talk safely there without arousing suspicion, and that's what we did until the early-morning hours.

One thing we decided was that we would move immediately to new quarters Ron and Snape located yesterday. The old cottage just wasn't satisfactory. The walls were so thin that we had to whisper to one another to avoid being overheard by our neighbors. And I'm sure that our irregular hours had already caused the neighbors to speculate on just what we do for a living. With Lord Voldemort warning everyone to report suspicious looking strangers, it had become downright dangerous to us to remain in a place with so little privacy.

The new place is much better in every way except the rent. We have a whole building to ourselves. It is actually a cement-block commercial building which once housed a small machine shop in a single, garage-like room downstairs, with offices and a storeroom upstairs.

The place has been condemned, because it lies on the right-of-way for a new muggle access road to the highway which has been in the planning stages for the last four years. Like all muggle projects these days, this one is also bogged down - probably permanently. Although hundreds of Wizards are being paid to help build new highways, none are actually being built.

The place really looks like hell on the outside. It's surrounded on three sides by a sagging, rusty chain-link fence. The grounds are littered with discarded water heaters, stripped-down engine blocks, and rusting muggle junk of every description. The concrete parking area in front is broken and black with old crankcase oil. There is a huge sign across the front of the building which has come loose at one end. It says: "Welding and Machining, J.T. Smith & Sons." Half the window panes on the ground floor are missing, but all the ground-floor windows are boarded up on the inside anyway.

The neighborhood is a thoroughly grubby light manufacturing area. Next door to us is a small muggle trucking company garage and warehouse. Trucks are coming and going at all hours of the night, which means the cops will not have their suspicions aroused if they see us active in this area at odd hours.

So, having decided to make the move, we did it today. Since there was no electricity, water, or gas in the new place, it was an ideal spot for laying low. I immediately set about establishing magical facilities for us to use during our stay.

The rest of my day was occupied in carefully covering all the chinks in the boards over the downstairs windows and in tacking heavy cardboard over the upstairs windows, so no ray of light can be seen from the building at night, so there is still no sign of magic activity inside.

The muggle amenities are still largely gone, but Hermione quickly converted the cauldron we had used into a toilet, and cast a softening charm on the floor to make it more comfortable for us to sleep on. Snape whipped up a quick batch of the strongest liquor (300 proof Wizardbrau) he could. Half an hour into the drinking, I proposed a toast to Hagrid, who was captured early on. Ron, drunk off his ass, set a new record for latency as he said not less than three hours later "To Hagarrrrr... besht fuggin' Ogre I everr knowed..." and then piddled himself.

Tomorrow I shall have a hangover, and a new purpose.


End file.
